Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations

Abstract. This article considers the debate that has recently developed in studies of nationalism between those scholars who see the nation as a modern and constantly changing construction ex nihilo and those who see it as an immemorial, unchanging communal essence. It outlines the so-called ‘gastronomical’ and ‘geological’ metaphors of nation formation and suggests a synthetic model which balances the influence of the ethnic past and the impact of nationalist activity. It shows that the central question which has divided theorists of nationalism is the place of the past in the life of modern nations. The author recognises the role of nationalists in national mobilisation but stresses that nationalists are not social engineers or mere image makers as modernist and post-modernist accounts would have it, but rather social and political archaeologists whose activities consist in the rediscovery and reinterpretation of the ethnic past and through it the regeneration of their national community.     

Enemies of liberty? Nationalism,immigration, and the framing of terrorism in the agenda of the Front National

This paper systematises the framing of the terrorism issue in the programmatic agenda of the Front national (FN) by focusing on nationalism. We argue that the FN's position on terrorism constitutes part of its strategy to justify its anti‐immigrant agenda by offering ideological rather than biological rationalisations for national belonging. To test our argument empirically, we operationalise four categories of nationalism, including ethno‐racial, cultural, political‐civic, and economic, and code official FN materials published in reaction to seven terrorist attacks on French soil during the period 1986–2015. We find that whilst older documents draw on all four categories, Marine Le Pen documents draw almost exclusively on the cultural and political‐civic categories, confirming our argument. Building on the “normalisation” or “de‐demonisation” approach, our nationalism framework presents a distinct theoretical advantage by allowing us to conceptualise the shift in the party's programmatic agenda.     

Nationalism,Britishness and the ‘Souring’ of Australian National Art

This article investigates the nationalist historiography of the Heidelberg School, an Australian art movement from the Federation period, known for its iconic representations of national life and landscape. Drawing on recent scholarship of Australian nationalism, it questions conventional accounts of the Heidelberg School in Australian art history, especially those based on Bernard Smith’s radical interpretation of this movement. For Bernard Smith, and the generations of Australian art historians he influenced, the nationalism of the 1890s was a progressive force for national culture. Yet, in the post-Federation decades, national art declined (or ‘soured’) into a reactionary form of insular nationalism. By focusing on the ‘souring’ narrative of Australian national art, this article critiques the nationalist interpretation of the Heidelberg School. It explores an apparent contradiction: the role of Britishness in the construction of a distinctly Australian national art.     

Multiculturalism as a New Form of Nationalism?

What is often described today as neo‐nationalism or nationalist populism today arguably looks like the old nationalism. What is emerging as genuinely new are the identity‐based nationalisms of the centre left, sometimes called “liberal nationalism” or “progressive patriotism.” I offer my own contribution to the latter, which may be called “multicultural nationalism.” I argue that multiculturalism is a mode of integration that does not just emphasise the centrality of minority group identities but argues that integration is incomplete without remaking national identity so that all can have a sense of belonging to it. This multiculturalist approach to national belonging has some relation to liberal nationalism. It, however, makes not just individual rights but minority accommodation a feature of acceptable nationalism. Moreover, accommodation here particularly includes ethno‐religious groups in ways that are difficult for radical regimes of secularism. For these reasons, multicultural nationalism unites the concerns of some of those currently sympathetic to majoritarian nationalism and those who are prodiversity and minority accommodationist in the way that liberal nationalism (with its emphasis on individualism and majoritarianism) does not. It therefore represents the political idea and tendency most likely to offer a feasible alternative rallying point to monocultural nationalism.     

Nationalism and Sexuality,What are the Issues?

Abstract. This article attempts to clarify in a systematic fashion the relationship between nationalism and sexuality. Whilst a relationship is now generally recognised between the two phenomena, it has been neglected relative to other issues. There are genuine reasons for this, the relationship being fraught with conceptual and empirical problems. Such problems are evident in the writings to date directly on nationalism and sexuality. This discussion attempts to initially disentangle racism and gender from nationalism and sexuality, respectively, before outlining what I consider to be the three major intersections: national sexual stereotypes, sexuality in national conflict and sexuality in nation-building. Each of the intersections are indicated by an assessment of their conceptual relationship, and illustrated by various historical instances.     

Nationalism Betrayed?

Arthur J. Dommen , The Indochinese Experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam . Indianapolis and Bloomington : Indiana University Press , 2001 . xiii + 1172 pp. Notes, index. $ (cloth).     

Why is the Nation-State so Vulnerable to Ethnic Nationalism?

Abstract. The strength of national identity derived from the belief that state elites would be the agents of equitable development. Their invented ideology of the social justice community resonated with the psychological needs of individuals in search of an imagined kinship community able to replicate the security of the family. From the late 1960s, the inability of state elites to fulfil their developmental promises led to a decline in state authority, which then translated into the erosion of its main legitimatory ideology – the myth of the assimilating nation. This generated the new legitimacy of countervailing ethnic nationalisms. Instead of looking to the state as the imagined kinship community, disillusioned citizens became receptive to new social justice claims by aspiring political elites, which depicted ethnicity as the alternative imagined kinship community. Attempts by state elites to manage these new ethnic claims face problems relating to the neutrality of the state and to the resonance of myths of the multicultural nation.     

Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Theological Critique of Nationalism

Abstract

This paper argues that Han Urs von Balthasar’s work contains a thorough critique of nationalism that is rooted in theological categories. First, it examines the bases of this critique in Balthasar’s theology of history and in his thought on biblical Israel. Then, it outlines four categories of actors included in Balthasar’s notion of a theological drama: Christ, the individual, humanity, and the Church. Both implicitly and explicitly, these four categories displace the nation from the realm of theologically-significant history. Thus, the paper contends, there is a clear and compelling theological rejection of nationalistic ideology running throughout key aspects of Balthasar’s thought.     

Averting ‘Irresponsible Nationalism’

ABSTRACT

Historians of politics in colonial Fiji highlight the contrast between Indian leaders' challenge to European dominance and Fijian chiefs' alignment with European political leaders in defence of colonial rule and against a perceived ‘Indian threat’. While this was the major political divide, its emphasis has neglected a moment of disaffection on the part of the leading chiefs that perhaps had the potential to provoke a challenge to the colonial order. The upset of the established pattern of political relations between Fijian leaders and the colonial government on the eve of the Pacific War, involving some unity with Indian leaders in the Legislative Council, influenced a Fijian policy change that shaped the development of Indigenous Fijian leadership and its quest for state power as British rule drew to an end. This paper suggests that Ratu Sukuna's Fijian Administration, established at the end of the war, be understood not simply as the last, and paradoxically the strongest, stage of colonial indirect rule, but more significantly as both an institutionalised expression and containment of a Fijian nationalist potential, initially energised by a tension in government – Fijian relations that, in part, reflected a white racialism in both official and unofficial attitudes and practices.     

Nationalism,populism or peopleism? Clarifying the distinction through a two-dimensional lens

Prompted by recent scholarly debates on the distinction between populism and nationalism, we elaborate on the Laclaudian understanding of populism as an antagonistic form of us-building/community-making that relies on the extension of equivalential chains between demands. From this heuristic perspective, populism can be understood as an empty form to be filled with different contents, such as nationalism. Our radically anti-essentialist stance combines Laclau's formalist conceptualisation of populism and Brubaker's work on nationalism. We highlight the ontological dimension of populism, as a form of us-building, and the ontic dimension, as an array of discursive repertoires that fill the form, such as ‘the people’ for peopleism. We explore the ontological–ontic distinction through the case of Narodism in Serbia. Conceptualising populism two-dimensionally contributes both to debates on the ‘core’ of populism and to cases where articulations of ‘the people’ coincide with expressions of nationhood, civilisationalism and culturalism, rather than being entirely the same.     

Is there Nationalism after Ernest Gellner? An exploration of methodological choices*

Abstract. This paper explores the advance of the study of nationalism with particular reference to hitherto neglected methodologies. After suggesting what might be the lesson to be learned from Ernest Gellner's critique of Wittgensteinian linguistic philosophy, I set out some of the considerations and questions which guide my own attempt at a definition of nationalism after Gellner. These are essentially concerned with the function of meaning for ‘real people’, that is, with the substantiation of the nation through the study of ideologies and feelings, links between interest and identity, conditions of responsiveness and the differential success of mass mobilisation. In the remainder of the paper, I explore the benefit that may be achieved from adopting the methodologies of the so‐called Cambridge school of the history of political thought and of social representations in social psychology.     

‘Supplicant Nationalism’ in Slovakia and Wales: Polyethnic Rights During the Nineteenth Century

During the nineteenth century, nationalists in Wales and Slovakia attempted to promote national goals by attempting to persuade English and Hungarian leaders to freely grant collective rights to the ‘subordinate’ nation. This strategy of ‘supplicant’ nationalism included effusive declarations of loyalty to the common state, exaggerated claims to moral superiority, and flattering comments about the ‘dominant’ nation. Supplicant nationalism closely resembles what Will Kymlicka called the struggle for ‘polyethnic rights’, but can still be seen as a form of nationalism.     

Critical Nationalism: A Liberal Prescription?

Abstract. In this article I examine the coherence of ‘liberal nationalism’, namely, the attempt to combine liberal and nationalist ideas. Attempts have been made to marry these ideas because of the belief that nationalism has continuing influence and importance for the achievement of liberal objectives, such as respect for identity, democracy and justice. Two central ideas in liberalism are the idea of self‐respect as a primary good and the idea of critical reflectiveness. A central idea in nationalism is the idea of the importance of the nation as a community. If critically reflective individuals are to possess self‐respect then, I argue, the value of membership of particular national communities needs to be argued for against criticism. By rejecting an appeal to universal principles, however, nationalists are unable to provide a reasoned defence of the importance of particular national communities, and therefore unable to satisfy the liberal commitment to self‐respect resulting from critical reflection on membership of a national community. The particularism of nationalism, indeed, pulls against the universalism of liberalism so that ‘liberal nationalism’ constitutes an incoherent construct.     

Staging Japan: The Takarazuka Revue and Cultural Nationalism in the 1950s–60s

In the 1950s and 1960s, the modern Japanese state employed overseas cultural promotion as a way to maximise its interests and image not only in international contexts but also at home. By juxtaposing the Takarazuka Revue’s performances in the United States and Japan during the postwar period, this paper argues that the overseas promotion of this Japanese theatre troupe both depended upon and reinforced the Japanese populace’s nationalistic pride in its culture. The paper also addresses the ways in which the Japanese government used Takarazuka’s theatrical presentations as a means of pursuing its domestic and diplomatic agendas: improving Japan’s international position by proposing shared aspects of popular culture with the US and increasing its sense of nationalism by propagating cultural pride. In doing so, the paper explicates the ways in which Japanese popular cultural considerations interfaced with political concerns in the shaping of postwar Japan’s national identity.